Levkas Man (23 page)

Gilmore nodded, smiling vaguely. ‘He was always writing to me, always asking my advice or for information. So he thought them worth keeping. I'm glad.'

‘They were typewritten,' I said. ‘All except the one written in 1935—in it you said you couldn't condone his behaviour, that it placed him beyond the pale and that thereafter everything he discovered would be suspect.'

‘You saw that letter, did you?' He leaned back, his eyes half-closed. ‘I see. And you don't understand it? You don't know what it's about?'

‘No.'

‘He never told you?' And then he nodded. ‘No, no, of course not. No man likes his son to know he was caught cheating.' He sipped his drink, staring at me. ‘You've read that paper on Marais. You know how a genius can be treated. And now … this is what I said I'd explain later.' He leaned forward quickly. ‘Whether he likes it or not, you've a right to know, for it will be remembered against him. However sound his theory, they won't believe him. And all because of something that happened a long time ago.' He paused and took a cigarette from the box above the drink locker. Bert lit it for him and he leaned back, puffing at it eagerly, his eyes half closed again as though collecting his thoughts. ‘He was just a kid at the time. It was after he had got his degree and had returned to South Africa. He was in an angry mood and it took him alone into the bush in search of the “dawn man”. He had a theory, you see.' He hesitated. ‘The theory won't interest you, of course, and since you obviously know nothing about his world it will be difficult to make you realize the enormity of what he tried to do.' His hand suddenly banged at the side of the settee berth. ‘And he was right. That was the tragedy of it. Everything that has been discovered since—a great deal during the last decade or so—has proved him right.' He sighed, leaning forward so that the bulkhead light sharpened the brittle bone formation of his face, glinted on his pale grey eyes. ‘But he tried to cut corners; he manufactured evidence. And that was unforgiveable.'

‘You mean the picture I saw in the album?'

He nodded.

‘And the evidence he manufactured—it was the skull, I suppose; the one displayed in the glass top of the bureau in his study?'

Gilmore nodded again, vigorously. ‘That's it. You remember I recognized it at once, as soon as I came into the study. I had never seen it before. Photographs, yes; but he never let it out of his hands. Wouldn't trust anybody to handle it.' He paused for a moment, his eyes a little wide and staring as though he were still appalled at what my father had done. And then suddenly he gave a small chuckle. ‘Does the Piltdown Man mean anything to you?' He seemed to assume my ignorance for his eyes searched the faces of the others, all listening intently, as though gathering his audience together. And then he went on, barely pausing for breath, ‘It was a hoax, the most fantastic, barefaced hoax in the history of anthropology.' Again the sudden, amused chuckle. ‘Students love it, of course. It makes all the experts look such fools.'

He paused there, and in the silence I could hear the wind ruffling the water against the hull. ‘Pieter was always fascinated by the Piltdown story. He argued that it fitted too neatly the post-Darwinian belief that
homo sapiens
was God-created, even though he did evolve from the apes.' He leaned back, drawing reflectively at his cigarette, blowing the smoke in a long streamer from his pursed lips, his eyes bright with the thought of what he was telling me. ‘You have to remember that the Darwinian theory of evolution was a great shock to the religious beliefs of the period. Even now, we are still very reluctant to face up to the realities of man's evolution—we tend to describe him as a tool-maker, when, in fact, his development is based mainly on his ability to produce weapons. When Darwin died in 1882 his theory of evolution was established beyond question, but most scientists clung doggedly to the idea of man created in the image of God. The Piltdown skull fitted this theory perfectly. The bits and pieces included part of a skull that indicated a brain almost as large as modern man's, and associated with it were the bones of animal remains dating back about a million years. The size of the brain case, in association with the known date of the animal remains, indicated that man had developed through God's gift of a large brain, not that his present large brain and capacity for thought had been part of the normal processes of evolution. Some of the more progressive scientists had reservations about the “dawn-man” as they called it, chiefly because there was half a jaw that clearly belonged to the chimpanzee family and the skull fragments could be reconstructed in various ways to give different sizes of brain.'

He went on to describe its discovery by some workmen in the gravels of the Sussex Ouse in 1912, how it had been accepted as genuine for forty years, and then he was explaining the way in which the whole thing had been bust wide open by a backroom anthropologist in the basement of the British Museum. His voice, his whole manner of telling it, had a sort of boyish enthusiasm that was infectious. Like Dart on the Taung skull, he made the Piltdown mystery sound like a detective story. First, the chemical test that had shown three times as much fluorine in the skull as in the jaw bone, proving beyond doubt that the two were quite unconnected. Then Geiger counter tests, with all the animal remains recording a count of between 10 and 25, except three elephant teeth, which gave counts of 175, 203 and 355. Finally, a world-wide search that tore the whole thing to shreds by indicating Tunisia as the only source of fossil remains of elephants giving such high beta ray counts.

He lit another cigarette. ‘That was in 1953–55,' he said. ‘Over forty years after—too long a gap for the man who perpetrated the hoax to be identified.' The thin parchment skin of his face was crinkled in a smile. ‘Extraordinary, isn't it? Picture him yourself, stealing off to Sussex one week-end with a pocketful of bones filched from some travelled family's private collection, then creeping out in the moonlight to bury them in a gravel pit where he knew workmen would discover them. And all those years, watching and saying nothing—just laughing to himself at such utter nonsense being taken seriously by the leading anthropologists and palæontologists of the day.'

The picture was so vivid, so detailed I couldn't help it: ‘You would have been a student yourself when the bones were originally discovered.'

He looked at me with his head on one side like a bird. ‘Yes, that's so.' He chuckled quietly to himself, then reached for his drink as though to drown his amusement. ‘But what Pieter did wasn't done for a joke. He'd no sense of humour. None whatever.' He was frowning, his face suddenly serious. ‘He was in deadly earnest. But unfortunately for him he was in Africa, out in the bush, not in a gravel pit in Sussex. There were no quarry men digging around in the cave-shelter where he buried his bones, so he had to dig them up himself. A youngster like that, rushing his fences …' He shook his head, no ghost of a smile. ‘However well disposed you were, you couldn't help smelling a rat. And then, when he wouldn't let the evidence out of his hands, only photographs—well, they tore him to pieces, those that bothered. And now, of course, those books published in the Communist countries.' He sighed and gave a little shrug. ‘A carbon-14 dating of 35,000
BP
—that's something no anthropologist will readily accept for Cro-Magnon man. And from him of all people … they're not going to like it, not at all.'

‘But they're scientists,' I said. ‘Surely, if the evidence is overwhelming …'

‘Where did those bones come from—did he tell you?'

‘No. But he seemed pleased when I told him you felt he'd no right to keep the location to himself. He said they'd talk, they'd pass it on and soon everybody would know. Isn't that how things become established—the gradual accumulation of evidence?' And I began telling him again about the red dunes, how this had established in the old man's mind the low level of the Mediterranean during the Ice Age.

But he refused to accept that the dunes formed a vital link in the chain of evidence. ‘I think you are confusing two things here. In my view, the essence of Pieter's genius is that he is willing to carry on an ethological—to use an American term—an ethological study, whilst at the same time developing in the field a new theory covering what to us has always been an evolutionary gap. If you had read his Journal … but then you probably wouldn't have understood it.' He sipped at his drink and turned to Sonia. ‘I have spent most of today reading and thinking about a report of some very interesting psychological experiments carried out on rhesus monkeys—controlled experiments in captivity set against careful and protracted studies of these nearest-to-human primates in the wild. And I have been comparing the conclusions this Harvard scientist arrives at with those reached by Pieter Van der Voort, not as a result of experimenting with monkeys, but achieved by taking a hard, detached look at himself. It's a fascinating study, starting with his childhood. His conclusion, basically, is that “normality” is only achieved within a social framework, that the loner represents the extremes, producing at one end of the spectrum the most debased of creatures, at the other end the most brilliant—the genius, the prophet, the great leader.' He chuckled quietly. ‘The trouble is that Pieter cannot make up his mind into which category he falls.'

Sonia shook her head. ‘I don't understand,' she said.

Nor did I. ‘He went there to escape. It was the only place he knew where he could hide up and at the same time still be in contact with the evidence that supported his theory.'

But Gilmore shook his head. ‘An experiment I would call it. These days we are so dazzled by our material progress—supersonic flight, nuclear physics, the moon landings, quasars, lasers, etc., etc.—we are apt to forget that our ancestors were quite remarkably advanced in other ways. You say that he was escaping into solitude. But remember, he had given way to his natural aggressive instincts—to the devil that is in all of us. And what if Christ were right—what if forty days and forty nights of lonely fasting and praying is the medically exact formula for inducing a state of self-hypnosis where environmental, even perhaps hereditary, instincts can be overcome? This I think was what he was trying to prove. Not an experiment with poor little captive monkeys, but an experiment with his own flesh, himself under the microscope, and then to have it interrupted …' He hesitated, frowning. ‘Lying in my bunk today I tried to put myself in his place, imagine how I would react when faced with a man like Holroyd seeking to take advantage of something I had discovered.' He shook his head. ‘Not easy.' He turned to Sonia again. ‘You know he half killed a man in Russia—at a dig of his near Tashkent?'

She nodded. ‘Yes. He told me. It was when he was ill, his mind rambling, and I wasn't sure.'

‘Oh, it was real all right. He goes into it in great detail in his Journal. A Bulgarian. He tried to throttle him with his bare hands, a blind fury of rage after the fellow had stolen some artefacts from his tent. Fortunately his assistant was near at hand, otherwise he'd have killed the poor devil. A fit of uncontrollable violence like that …' He looked across at me. ‘Now perhaps you understand why he was so disturbed, so mortified at his blind, instinctive attack on Cartwright.'

That night I dreamed I faced my father, both of us hell-bent on murder. Maybe it was the prawns we'd had for dinner. I was berthed in a pipe cot up for'ard amongst the sails and I woke in a muck sweat thinking I'd killed him. After that I dozed fitfully, feeling we were both of us doomed. Then suddenly it was four o'clock and Bert woke me with a cup of tea.

We were away at first light, motoring south in the wake of a big trading caique, the old canal banks straight lines of stone in a vast area of shallows. The flat marsh country, the grey dawn, depressed me and my mood was sombre. Ahead, on its hill, rose the massive bulk of Fort St George, and beyond it, the bare bleak island hills stood like early prints, rimming the open roadstead of Port Drepano.

The sun rose as we left the Canal, keeping between the three pairs of buoys that marked the dredged channel, and the towering heights of Levkas were touched with gold. The sea was glass, not a breath of wind. By seven-thirty we were abreast of Skropio, a steep little wooded island owned by a Greek millionaire, and half an hour later we entered Port Vathy, the houses sleeping in the morning sun and donkeys browsing at the water's edge. There was a small fishing boat selling the night's catch and near it a caique loaded with bright-coloured Turkish rugs. The Customs Officer greeted us in his own home, dressed in vest and trousers, not yet shaved, and when Bert had obtained permission to visit the inlets of Meganisi provided he finally cleared from Vathy, Florrie began to make enquiries about Holroyd.

‘Holerod. Né, né.' The Greek official nodded vigorously and told her that the whole party had arrived the day before in a caique from limáni Levkas. They had enquired about a man who had been digging the year before in a cave beyond Spartokori and he had taken them to see Zavelas. Would we like to talk to Zavelas who spoke English and knew everything that went on in Meganisi?

We found him on the waterfront, sitting at a table in the shade with the Pappas. He was a big, powerful man with a hooked nose and iron grey hair. The Greek Orthodox priest was younger, a very striking figure in his black habit, tall black hat, his dark beard combed and silky and his long hair drawn back to a little bun above the nape of the neck. I think it was the presence of the priest that made Florrie excuse herself and return to join Sonia on the boat.

Zavelas was a very different man to my garrulous friend at Preveza, quieter, more reserved. And very much tougher. He had gone to sea as a kid, tramps first, then whaling and sealing out of Gloucester, Mass. He had served in the U.S. navy during World War II, had been a lumberjack out west in the Rockies and had finished up as a cop in San Francisco. ‘Fisherman's Wharf—you know it?'